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Thursday, 26 December 2013

The cast of The Reckless Engineer celebrates Christmas the year before while a storm is brewing that would explode less than ten months later.

Jeremy clutched his steering wheel in anger mixed with a kind of ache that had not lessened after all these months. He had pulled over outside Maggie’s house, having driven all the way to Southampton from London to surprise her, a wrapped present of diamond studded anklets forlorn on the seat next to him. Maggie had gorgeous feet with long French manicured toes and he had longed to latch the anklets around them. That, however, was Gregory’s SUV in her driveway. Jeremy had been sure that Maggie and he were back together for good when she had driven over to his flat in London Kensington and stayed three nights with him just last week. The sex had been so intimate, powerful, and he had poured his heart out to her about his worries about his new company. Radio Silicon’s had finished its first engineering contract a month ago and, try as he might, Jeremy had not been able to land another one in this recession. He needed her now. How could she be with him and then sleep with Gregory only a few days later as if she and he had never happened?
He couldn’t go home to Mother. He had told his parents that he was spending Christmas with Maggie. They loved Maggie and were so proud of her, and he had never told them that she had broken up and moved out.
He thought for a moment and pressed the fast-dial button on his mobile. ‘Hey, Harry. I’m coming over for Christmas after all. You still have a place open around your dinner table?’
Thank god for Harry, his best friend––as far as Jeremy was concerned, almost his brother. Growing up on the same street together, Jeremy had defended Harry from the playground bullies through their school years and Harry had bailed him out of all the trouble he got into during their university days together at Stanford. With another glance at Maggie’s house, which sent something like an acidic lump burning its way from the back of his throat through his heart down to his gut, Jeremy put his car back into gear. The Fortnum & Mason hamper and the bottle of champagne on his back seat would go to Christmas dinner with him at Harry’s place.

* * *

The Family was gathered in the Sitting Room of the McAllen mansion in Aberdeen. After a hearty Christmas dinner they were now enjoying an assortment of deserts in the Sitting Room. It was eerie how much this room reflected the Sitting Room in his own house in Guildford, Jack thought; but then Caitlin and Douglas McAllen had directed the designs and the build of that part of their house and Caitlin had wanted her own little bit of Scotland right in the heart of Hampshire.
The men were in tartan kilts, a variation derived from the tartan of the MacAlister clan the family descended from. Douglas McAllen always insisted on it. Jack felt ridiculous in the skirt, but he would dare not show anything but enthusiasm to anyone in “The Family” even though he always privately complained about it to Caitlin (which she would answer by asking him to stop being so cross all the time). That morning he had had to follow the McAllen men and join a long procession of nearly fifty Scottish clans for a slow march around Aberdeen to the wail of bagpipes after which they had been served steaming bowls of soup and bread at the church-hall. He had to admit he had felt something primal and exhilarating about all that male tribal energy in the hall after the march, and the buttered bread soaked in the soup had tasted so good.
Gillian was helping little one-year-old Kristie unwarp the presents around the brightly lit Christmas tree while the toddler’s proud parents, Ronnie and Elise, and grandma Leanna looked on, laughing and applauding. McAllen briefly stopped the discussion with Jack on the electromagnetic telemetry tool for detecting oil and gas reservoirs that was on Jack’s planning table at the McAllen Blackgold offices down south to look on at his granddaughters with a proud benevolent smile. Jack could sense he had McAllen all excited about this device, but why the hell the he kept probing him about the electro-mechanical details that only an electrical engineer could understand Jack didn't know. Well, he had got used to humouring the old man, keeping his impatience in check. Jack followed McAllen's gaze and glanced around the room. The McAllen women were all in tartan skirts but for Caitlin who had had a pair of trousers made out of her family tartan. Caitlin always liked to wear the trousers.
A splash, splash of water drew Jack’s attention to the pool outside the large French patio doors. As usual Peter had tagged along up to Scotland with everybody and, as usual, he was swimming his evening laps outside in the heated swimming pool. As he had promised Marianne, Jack would fly down to Portsmouth with Peter tomorrow morning, leaving the rest of his family behind, and have Boxing Day dinner with his own kids, Peter and Mark, and his mother at Marianne’s.
A text vibrated the Blackberry in Jack’s hand. There wasn’t even a pocket to keep his phone in this bloody costume. Jesus, it was Michelle with one of those “sextexts” as she called them. It had been six months since he had got involved with Michelle and now he wanted out. He had broken up with her just before Christmas. A sudden tremor of fear ran through him like a chill. She had thrown a tantrum and threatened to tell Caitlin all about the affair, and here she was invading this respectable family scene with a brash, explicit message that had a hint of a threat in it. He had better stop by her house and pacify her before driving over to Marianne’s. Jack knew what pacifying her meant––wild, clothes tearing, sweat pouring, neck biting, back scraping, loud groaning sex. Jack took in a deep breath, puffed out his cheeks, and blew out the air slowly as if he were blowing into a bowl of hot butternut squash soup with bits of bacon in it.

Read more on THE RECKLESS ENGINEER, Jac Wright's much loved and highly reviewed classic mystery and legal thriller set in London and the beautiful coastal towns of South England and Scotland on Amazon.com.

Thursday, 19 December 2013

In a previous post I discussed how to manage the tension in the 2 main underlying storylines in creating a series of suspense fiction. In this post I shall try to discuss the stages one goes through in creating a Mystery and Suspense book.

Generally, for me, the core idea of the story for a book comes inextricably interwoven with the main characters in the story in a moment of sudden inspiration. The story is very powerful when this happens. I think for this to happen you have to be a long time reader of crime fiction and viewer of crime fiction on television and in the film media. I have been a classics reader and a crime reader and viewer from early childhood because of the influence of my parents––my mother is an addicted reader of the classics, and my father not only reads crime fiction, but also got me addicted to crime production series like Tales of the Unexpected (based on Roald Dahl’s fiction), Perry Mason (Earle Stanley Gardner’s fiction), Mission Impossible (the TV series), and adventure series like MacGyver as a child. I have read a lot of Agatha Christies among other crime writers I admire such as Patricia Highsmith, Benjamin Black, Ian Rankin, and Micahel Connelly. It is never too late to start reading the leading mystery and suspense writers you admire––in fact I believe it is essential to be a voracious reader. This acclimatizes you into thinking in Suspense subconsciously and increases the chance that a great plot idea will arise from somewhere at the back of your mind when you least expect it.

For example, I woke up late on a warm summer day last June with an image of a fugitive escaping and running away from an overturned van transporting him to court from prison that had met with an accident. Prisoners wear normal clothing in England, not orange jumpsuits, and they are not in chains. He runs into the crowds and a bus parked behind a mall to hide among the people only to find that it is a film set. The actor playing a main character of the movie and the director are having a fight. The actor suddenly punches the director in the face who falls backward. My protagonist fugitive hiding among the supporting film crew catches him and breaks the fall. The director gets up, wipes the blood off his nose, fires the main actor loudly, and asks him to get out of his movie set. He turns to my protagonist and asks: ‘You there, what’s your name?’ ‘Art Miller,’ he gives a fake name. ‘Art, you are playing Michael Fallon. His trailer is yours now. Go with my crew and get dressed.’ And there I have the plot, the main characters, and the first chapter of my standalone book to come, In Plain Sight.

The core plot idea for The Reckless Engineer was derived as a complementary plot from the idea for The Closet that came to me in a moment of sudden inspiration––an image of my protagonist trapped in a closet overhearing the one he loves intensely saying things that break his heart. The Closet is about the troubles my protagonist gets into because he acts blinded by passionate love for the female. In it I am right inside my protagonist’s head, telling the reader how it feels for him––the joys, the angst, and the fears––from his point of view using a very close third person limited POV. While thinking of coming up with a plot for The Reckless Engineer, I decided to explore this same idea, but this time I would explore the impact of the actions of my protagonist blinded by passion and romantic love from the viewpoints of the people around him; i.e. his family, friends, and people at work.

Hence, when you get an inspired idea you can think of different interesting angles of exploring it.

So, when it comes to a murder mystery, someone has to die. Why would someone be driven to kill another person? It has been said that the most common motive for murder is love, or rather the loss of it––many are crimes of passion. Apparently the next most prolific motive is to prevent loss of wealth or to gain wealth. A third common motive is self-preservation or preservation of some aspect of one’s lifestyle when one has done something seriously illegal or wrong and another person knows about it. A fourth is for revenge for some great wrong someone has done; or to escape it if the wrongdoing is ongoing.

Great. So we have a protagonist who is involved in a love affair blinded by romantic love. We immediately have his family around him who will have motives to kill the female for his love. We make our protagonist very rich and there we have the motive for people around him to kill for the wealth involved. We make our victim involved in doing some great wrong to some other characters and there they have motives to kill her for revenge or to escape this wrongdoing. Hence, once you have the main plot idea, you build (generally 4 to 7) characters around the core characters and create a conflict each of the other characters is involved in with your victim. Along with a motive and a conflict you give each of your main characters an overriding psychology and keep each one true to his or her psychology, letting them then drive the story forward from the initial seed idea.

At this stage it helps to have studied drama and plays for the scene setting because each book is fifty or more dramatic scenes. It also helps with your prose to have studied poetry.

Then we get down to how the victim is going to be killed. It has been said that poison was Agatha Christie’s preferred technique, but one could have the victim pushed from a great height, suffocated while sleeping, strangled, bludgeoned with a fatal blow, drowned etc. Since I was writing a story about electronics engineers I knew about the problem of potassium cyanide toxicity in the potassium auro cyanide (Auro or Au is the chemical name and sign for gold respectively) gold electroplating process used in electronics. I had to do some research from this point on to actually find day-to-day used chemicals from which poisonous cyanide can be synthesised in order to give all my suspects (not just the electronics engineers) the means of accessing this murder weapon of choice. You can replace the gold (Auro) in the compound with iron (Ferro) to have a very similar reaction with potassium ferrocynide, which is used as a normal fertilizer, and therefore I now had a murder weapon accessible to all my suspects. (You can read a little more about this on Wikipedia.)

Then you have to select which one of the suspects you are going to make the culprit and think about how the culprit would go about concealing his or her crime. However, he or she must make some mistakes and leave some discreet clues for our hero, the amateur sleuth, and our readers to find.

The above takes care of the Mystery or the Whodunnit, which is an intellectual process––that of detecting and analysing the clues and evidence and arriving at the clever conclusion of who did the deed. You drive your reader through piquing his or her intellectual curiosity to uncover the crime.

Suspense, however, is an emotional process and you have to get your reader emotionally involved or the story is not strong enough. You have to draw your reader in and get them emotionally involved with your characters––make your reader ache for your characters, anxious for them, fear for them, love and feel protective of them, or even hate some of them. You raise the tension through the story primarily by making your reader anxious and fear for a core set of your characters while hating a few others. At the end you relieve your readers’ anxiety and fear sustained through the book by delivering the good characters you make them love to safety and happiness. You relieve the hatred and aversion you build for your bad characters by punishing the wrongdoers in some way. And that I believe is what makes great Suspense Fiction.

Monday, 2 December 2013

Writing a series of full-length suspense fiction is somewhat different from writing a standalone book. There are two storylines and two sets of characters that one needs to develop.

First you have the story of your particular book, which I shall call “the episode storyline.” In The Reckless Engineer this is Jack Connor’s story and the story about the murder. The main characters of this episode story are Jack Connor and the four beautiful but very different women that are in his life––his wife Caitlin McAllen, his ex-wife Marianne Connor, his ex-girlfriend Sally Trotter, and his latest but newly murdered squeeze, Michelle Williams. Jack’s powerful father-in-law Douglas McAllen, his brother-in-law Ronnie McAllen, his two sons, his step-daughter, and his manager, Allan Walters, are all characters that belong to the Episode Storyline.

One needs to start the book at a point of significant tension in the Episode Storyline and develop the tension steadily and rapidly, weaving in the background information at strategic points. One also develops the Episode characters rapidly and forcefully in the foreground, with bold introductory paragraphs, such that the conflicts between them add to the mounting tension and suspense.

While this is going on, there is a series storyline that one cannot ignore. This storyline has a series lead who, in the case of a mystery, is one’s amateur sleuth, and he has some recurring characters in his life. Generally there is a sidekick or a partner. In The Reckless Engineer series our lead Jeremy Stone has a sidekick, Otter, who will be developed further in this role in the next book. In this episode, his partner is the criminal defence attorney, Harry Stavers, who duals expertly with the police, the prosecution, and the media hounding his clients and leads the defence of the case in Crown Court while Jeremy blends in with the Episode characters and gets down to the business of solving the mystery of “who dunnit.” There is also a second partner, Stephen Barratt, who is introduced at the very end of the story ready to be brought forth in the next book in the series.

We introduce and develop the Series characters gently in the background throughout the story. Their characters are revealed in discussion with the Episode characters gradually. Jeremy, the Series lead, also has a personal life with characters Maggie Harris and Annie Wren in it. Their story develops on the slow boil on the back burner, ready to come to the foreground and play out in the next books in the series.

The Episode storyline starts at a high point of tension, rapidly develops, climaxes at the few paragraphs near the end, and drops to a satisfying ending of zero tension. In the meantime the Series storyline develops with slowly mounting tension, peaks, and then drops a little to a level of intermediate tension at a level a little higher than at the start, ready to rise in tension again with the next book.

The two storylines, Episode and Series stories, merge where characters from the Episode storyline, if any, join the Series storyline as recurring characters in the future books. Whether and how this happens the reader would need to read The Reckless Engineer and find out.

Sunday, 1 December 2013

The Reckless Engineer is as much a legal thriller of a case through the English criminal courts as a traditional murder mystery. I thought this was fitting because the lawyers get involved the moment a suspect is taken into custody. The police get 48 hours to either charge the suspect or release him. To hold the suspect in custody for longer they must present their case to a Magistrate and get a court order showing good cause.

There are two criminal courts in the English system: the Magistrates’ Court and the Crown Court. All criminal cases start in the lower Magistrates’ Court, which continues to hear the cases of smaller crimes carrying community service or shorter custodial sentences. The cases in the Magistrates Court are usually heard by a less senior officer called a Magistrate. This lower court will pass on the hearings of more serious crimes carrying longer custodial sentences and generally requiring a jury over to the Crown Court.

Writing a legal thriller through the English courts is, however, a daunting task to take on. There are no legal thrillers set in the British courts that I am aware of. I have read Earl Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason series in my late teens, but these stories are set in an American court. Even most of John Grisham’s cases are based in civil litigation. Michael Connelly's The Lincoln Lawyer series is the strongest contemporary criminal litigation stories I know. I decided to base no part of my book on past literature, not only because there were no past thrillers I could find based in English courts, but also because I wanted this work to be real, contemporary, and original. I decided to write it from real experience of the English courts system.

Fortunately I have a close friend who is a barrister to help me with my legal research and in whose image I have cast Harry Stavers. I followed my friend and his solicitors through months of criminal litigation, from the initial arrest and interview of suspects at police stations through to criminal appeals in the high court. I have spent many a day sitting in a courtroom, absorbing the environment and the proceedings. The rigorous and solemn Crown court hearings are a grand affair with wigged and cloaked judges and court officers. I have also spent many hours reading my friend’s legal books searching for the right procedures and real case histories.

Behind the calm and solemn proceedings, the police station and the courtroom is arena of fierce duelling and battle. The police lie, the prosecutors lie; the witnesses and the lawyers lie at times. Unfortunately, the rich and the powerful do get away with crimes or get light sentences while the poor get treated harshly unfairly in the British courts. I decided, however, not to explore that in the book. I decided to make the court system equally just and tough for the rich and poor alike in The Reckless Engineer.

The result is something unique––a traditional murder mystery closely woven together with a realistic and contemporary legal thriller through the English courts. We therefore fittingly have an English Magistrates’ courtroom in the cover art.

Sunday, 24 November 2013

With The Reckless Engineer I wanted to create an engineering hero and a series about an engineering firm. The only hero in fiction I can think of who is an engineer is Barney from the Mission Impossible TV series. There is Q from the Bond series, but he is an old and geeky supporting character working from a bunker. There are so many legal and medical dramas, but where are the dramas centred on engineering firms? I wanted to bring an engineering drama to life, treated for an audience not familiar with the profession the same way that legal and medical dramas are.

The environment of an engineering firm in reality is just like in the book, so much so that this could be non-fiction but for the murder set in the middle of it. The characters are very realistic. Jack Connor, for instance, is of a somewhat smaller physique and tries to over-compensate for it by going after glamorous women. Women are somehow attracted to his brilliance and confidence at his work and well as the security and the respectability society assigns him because of his profession. Then there are people like Alan, Jack and Jeremy's boss at Marine Electronics, who make it to management positions because they have more people skills, are extrovert, and are better looking. Jeremy's character is still coming into its own and is in transition through the book and the series. He is emerging as a manager and a leader from the subordinate position he has been in so far. And then you have the super rich owners of these engineering businesses like the McAllens. There is also the occasional female engineer like Sally who is very introverted, outmanoeuvred at every opportunity by the much more glamorous and outgoing Michelle. These characters are a cross section of people you would get in an engineering firm in reality.

One important reason I wanted to create a hero like Jeremy was to attract youngsters to the field. I have deemed this particular story to be for an 18+ audience because it deals with infidelity in the plot. The future books in the series, however, will be very YA friendly. I want young adults to know how entertaining, satisfying, powerful, and glamorous the engineering field is so that they will be attracted to the profession.

An engineer would make a very strong amateur detective. They have brilliant, sharp, and analytical minds that are trained to absorb minute details in the environment. They are strong problem solvers and solution creators; solution creation to difficult problems is what engineers do in their day to day work. If you put a problem or a question before an engineer his mind will switch into solution seeking gear and the question will bug him until he can find an answer, until he comes up with a solution that will surprise those around him. An electronics engineer also has the means and the skills to build gadgets like hidden miniature cameras, miniature microphones, and other electronics surveillance equipment. They are mechanically good with their hands and can, for example, work mechanical locks as well as electronic ones. They have the capacity to hack into anything via software. This is why Jeremy is going to be a super amateur sleuth.

Friday, 22 November 2013

As an an electronics engineer and a published author I travel quite a bit on book tours and for work. I also like to go on holiday to exotic locations––to small island destinations and on rough safari adventures.

Away from the comfort of my own bed and with my body clock confused by daylight and time differences, sleep was getting to be a real problem. I used to turn up for book signings and meetings late or sleep deprived and feeling like a zombie; and I have wasted parts of my holidays too tired for the activities.

That was before I discovered my old trusty hot water bottle with its fluffy brown cover. I get a sturdy one ever since and like to fill it up fully with boiling water. I like to get a cover made of fleece or brushed cotton that is soft on my feet.

You do not have to wear tight uncomfortable socks in cold weather or with the inadequate covering you get in some hotels. It warms your feet while allowing the rest of your body to stay cooler and puts you into a very deep sleep very fast. It stays warm for over 8 hours and you wake up from a deep sleep feeling fresh and ready to take on the world wherever you are.

People who have been long-suffering insomniacs have told me that it is the cheapest and most effective sleep aid they have had. They love it because it does not have the nasty side effects of sleeping pills that damage your health and at times leave you feeling like a zombie. It is easy to carry; you empty it and pack it flat between your clothes. There is always a source of hot water wherever you travel and it takes just minutes to fill it up and slip it under the covers.

It has had the same effect on my family and friends I have shared this tip with, so much so that as winter approaches it has become a great holiday gift idea for the cold months. I present people who don't already have one with a hot water bottle and fluffy covers of various patterns and colours appealing to the person's age and sex. Often I fill the cover up with surprise gifts, like one would do with a holiday sock.

It is a great travel companion and a holiday gift idea everybody will love.

I take great care
with each of the four aspects in the stories I write, which comes to me naturally, for sacrificing even one aspect makes the story weak and diminishes its value––it makes the story stumble.

The core of the plot
and the main characters usually come to me inextricably interwoven together in
a moment of inspiration like a segment of a film or a disjointed dream. For
example, I woke up late on a warm summer day this June with an image of a
fugitive escaping and running away from an overturned van transporting him to
court from prison that had met with an accident. Prisoners wear normal clothing
in England, not orange jumpsuits, and they are not in chains. He runs
into the crowds and a bus parked behind a mall to hide among the people only to
find that it is a film set. The actor playing a main character of
the movie and the director are having a fight. The actor suddenly punches the
director in the face who falls backward. My protagonist fugitive hiding among
the supporting film crew catches him and breaks the fall. The
director gets up, wipes the blood off his nose, fires the main actor loudly,
and asks him to get out of his movie set. He turns to my protagonist
and asks: ‘You there, what’s your name?’ ‘Art Miller,’ he gives a
fake name. ‘Art, you are playing Michael Fallon. His trailer is
yours now. Go with my crew and get dressed.’ And there I have the
plot, the main characters, and the first chapter of my standalone book, In
Plain Sight.

At this point, the most important aspect is the characters. I am a firm
believer if Virgnia Woolf's Bloomsbury school of writing. I give each one of my
characters a particular psychology and then keep them true to this psychology
through the story. I got interested in Freudian and Jungian schools of psychology
during Stanford's Liberal Arts education program and have kept up the study of
it over the years. Sometimes my writing is almost a close psychoanalysis
of a character or two. I keep my characters true to their particular psychology
through the story, and hence they may do a mix of things that are good or
bad. However, they always remain true to their particular psychology though they
sometimes struggle against it due to the demands from those around them or from
their own conscience.

After I have the main plot idea and my main characters I build a world for
them, although the world that I build is a little corner of contemporary Britain
that we live in. For me it is very important to do justice to the
place that I set the story in (in The Reckless Engineer, that is Portsmouth,
London, and Aberdeen, Scotland). My writing will always evoke a strong sense of
the towns––its sceneries, industries, architecture, and the
general atmosphere––painting these for the reader like with a brushstroke. Character and world building go hand in hand for characters cannot exist in a vacuum and must have a world they inhabit and the writer must paint the full picture of the characters in their little corner of the world, bringing the whole scene to life, in the mind of the reader.

One author who excels at world building in very poetic language in his crime fiction is Benjamin Black. Ian Rankin is also known to favour such literary writing where no aspect is ignored or sacrificed.

I then put my characters with their individual psychologies in the world I
build for them and let them drive the story forward. The plot progresses and
emerges naturally from the actions of the characters who remain true to their
psychology throughout.

For the writing I draw a lot from my training in classic poetry and drama. I
tend to use a good amount of imagery and phonetically appealing phrasing to
enhance the ambience. I set most of the scenes as if I were writing a
stage drama or a film setting. In fact each novel is a series of 50 or more
dramatic scenes.

There are aspects or techniques in addition to the Four Cornerstones above that
I engage in my writing. There may be socio-political, ethical, and
philosophical commentary interspersed in the narrative. They enhance the
structure of the story as well as character building. For example, economic stressrors in the years the story is set in will impact on how the characters act. Sacrificing even one of the Four Cornerstones
is something I do not do. One must treat all four aspects with respect. It is
silly to sacrifice one or the other because the story topples and leans in the
direction of the weak cornerstone. I therefore build my stories on my Four Cornerstones of fiction writing––Characters, Plot, World Building, and Literary Prose & Narrative.

Monday, 30 September 2013

I write in spells. At times I might write a dozen hours a day for over a week, and then I might not write anything again for several weeks. Sometimes I might write for a few hours a day for weeks. I find I cannot force myself to write when I feel the block. If I do, the writing comes out contrived and not feeling right. Inspiration has to come to me naturally. I just have to leave the manuscript aside and do something else until the words and ideas start to flow again.

I do a couple of things when I hit the Writer's Block. The first thing I try is setting the manuscript aside and reading a good book. I hit a very difficult spot just before the scene in Chapter 15 of The Reckless Engineer. I felt that the part of chapter 15 I had written was dull and was slowing down the pace of the plot. Try as I might I could not think of a way to maneuver the plot to pick up the pace again. At this point I decided to put the writing aside and read a book. I read two Agatha Christie books, At Bertram’s Hotel and Cards on the Table, at this point. Then, when I returned to my writing about a week later, I decided it was time to bring the character Jack Connor home. I had kept him in custody until that point. I then deleted the part of that chapter I had previously written and started writing in this new direction. Everything came easily to me after that insight into how I should progress the plot which had to occur to me in a moment of inspiration in its own time.

I reached a second nasty block when I needed to write the scenes with Jeremy at a Portsmouth seaside hotel, The Royal Atlantic. This time I knew the plot, but the prose was not coming out right. I had moved out of Portsmouth by then, but I decided to take three days off and check into The Royal Beach Hotel in Southsea, Portsmouth to see if I could get the words flowing again. I did the same again, volunteering at a back-stage to help a friend at the Gielgud theatre, to write the scene set in the London West End.

I do not write while I am at the scene. I just immerse myself in the environment and absorb the people, the sense of the surroundings, the sounds, and the views. I interact with the people and I might take some photographs. I come out of the scene and do something entirely different for about a week, letting the ideas and the images work their magic at the back of my mind. Then when I sit down to write again the words just flow naturally.

These two techniques – reading a good book or two and immersing myself in the scenery I want to write about – have always helped me out of brief spells of the Writer's Block. They have never failed to get me writing again.

Wednesday, 27 February 2013

The Reckless Engineer is the first in author Jac Wright's series of literary suspense, mystery, and legal drama.

Jack Connor's lives an idyllic life by the Portsmouth seaside married to Caitlin McAllen, a stunning billionaire heiress, and working at his two jobs as the Head of Radar Engineering at Marine Electronics and as the Director of Engineering of McAllen BlackGold, his powerful father-in-law Douglas McAllen's company in extreme engineering in Oil & Gas. He loves his two sons from his first marriage and is amicably divorced from his beautiful first wife Marianne Connor. Their idyllic lives are shattered when the sexy and alluring Michelle Williams, with whom Jack is having a secret affair and who is pregnant with his child, is found dead and Jack is arrested on suspicion for the murder.

Jeremy Stone brings in London's top defence attorney, Harry Stavers, to handle his best friend's defence.

Who is the bald man with the tattoo of a skull seen entering the victim's house? Who is "KC" who Caitlin makes secret calls to from a disposable mobile? Has the powerful Douglas McAllen already killed his daughter's first partner, and is he capable of killing again? Is Caitlin's brother Ronnie McAllen's power struggle with Jack for the control of McAllen Industries so intense that he is prepared to kill and frame him? Is the divorce from his first wife as amicable on her part as they believe it to be? Are his sons prepared to kill for their inheritance? Who are the ghosts from Caitlin's past in Aberdeen, Scotland haunting the marriage? What is the involvement of Jack's manager at Marine Electronics?

The cast of characters is made more colorful by the supporting entourage: the big bald Scott Skull and his gang Hose and Heineken, Douglas McAllen’s bumbling solicitors McKinley and Magnus Laird, the cigar smoking private investigators Cossack and Levent, and the gay black actor working in the London West End, Otter.

While Jack is charged and his murder trial proceeds in the Crown Court under Harry’s expert care, Jeremy runs a race against time to find the real killer and save his friend, if he is in fact innocent, in a lurid saga of love, desire, power, and ambition.